Tough McCarthy was in the communal rooms, busily delving into the
recesses of a circus trunk, from which, from time to time, he emerged
with the loot of the combined McCarthy family.
"Dink, my boy, cast your eye over my burglaries. Look at them. Aren't
they lovely, aren't they fluffy and sweet? I don't know what half of 'em
are, but won't they decorate the room? And every one, 'pon my honor, the
gift of a peach who loves me! The whole family was watching, but I got
'em out right under their noses. Well, why not cheer me!"
He deposited on the floor a fragrant pile of assorted embroideries,
table-covers, lace pincushions, and filmy mysteries purloined from
feminine dressing-tables, which he rapidly proceeded to distribute about
the room according to his advanced theories on decoration, which
consisted in crowding the corners, draping the gas-jets, and clothing
the picture-frames.
Stover sat silently, out of the mood.
"Here's three new scalps," continued McCarthy, producing some cushions.
"Had to vow eternal love, and keep the dear girls separated--a blonde
and two brunettes--but I got the pillows, my boy, I got 'em. And now sit
back and hold on."
He made a third trip to the trunk, unaware of Stover's distracted mood,
and came back chuckling, his arms heaped with photographs to his chin.
"One thousand and one Caucasian beauties, the pride of every State, the
only girls who ever loved me. Look at 'em!"
He distributed a score of photographs, mustering them on the
mantelpiece, pinning them to the already suspended flags, massing them
in circles, ranging them in crosses and ascending files, and announced:
"Finest I could gather in. Only know a third of 'em, but the sisters
know the rest. Isn't it a beauty parlor? Why, it'll make that blond
warbler Stone, downstairs, feel like an amateur canary." Suddenly aware
of Stover's opposite mood, he stopped. "What the deuce is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"You look solemn as an owl."
"I didn't know it."
"Well, how did you like Le Baron?"
"He's a corker!" said Stover militantly.
"I've been arranging about an eating-joint."
"You have?"
"We're in with a whole bunch of fellows. Gimbel, an Andover chap, is
running it. Five dollars a week. We can see if we can stand it."
"Tough, go slow."
"Why so?"
Stover hesitated, looking at McCarthy's puzzled expression, and,
looking, there seemed to be ten years' experience dividing them.
"Oh, I only mean we want to pick our friends carefully," he said at
length.
"What difference does it make where we eat?"
"Well, it does."
"Oh, of course we want to enjoy ourselves."
Stover saw he did not understand and somehow, feeling all the exuberant
enthusiasm that actuated him, he hesitated to continue the explanation.
"By George, Dink," continued McCarthy comically solicitous of his scheme
of decoration, "is there anything like the air of this place? You can't
resist it, can you? Every one's out working for something. By George, I
hope I can make good!"
"You will," said Stover. And in his mind was already something of the
paternal protection that he had surprised in Hunter, the big man of the
Andover crowd.
"If I'm to do anything at football I've got to put on a deuce of a lot
of weight," said McCarthy a little disconsolately. "Guess my best chance
is at baseball."
"The main thing, Tough, is to get out and try for everything," said
Stover wisely. "Show you're a worker and it's going to count."
"That's good advice--who put it into your head?"
"Le Baron talked over a good many things with me," said Stover slowly.
"He gave me a great many pointers. That's why I said go slow--we want to
get with the right crowd."
"The right crowd?" said McCarthy, wheeling about and staring at his
room-mate. "What the deuce are you talking about, Dink? Do you mean to
say any one cares who in the blankety-blank we eat with?"
"Yes."
"What! Who the deuce's business is it to meddle in my affairs? Right
crowd and wrong crowd--there's only one crowd, and each man's as good as
the other. That's the way I look at it." He stopped, amazed, looking
over at Stover. "Why, Dink, I never expected you to stand for the right
and wrong crowd idea."
"I don't mean it the way you do," said Stover lamely--for he was trying
to argue with himself. "We're trying to do something here, aren't
we--not just loaf through? Well, we want to be with the crowd that's
doing things."
"Oh, if you mean it that way," said McCarthy dubiously, "that's
different. I've been filled up for the last hour with nothing but
society piffle by a measly-faced runt just out of the nursery called
Schley. Skull and Bones--Locks and Keys--Wolf's-Head--gold bugs,
hobgoblins, toe the line, heel the right crowd, mind your _p's_ and
_q's_, don't call your soul your own, don't look at a society house,
don't for heaven's sake look at a pin in a necktie, never say 'bones' or
'fee-fie-fo-fum' out loud--never--oh, rats, what bosh!"
"Schley is an odious little toad," said Stover evasively. A little vain
of his new knowledge and the destiny before him, he looked at the
budding McCarthy with somewhat the anxiety of a mother hen, and said
with great solemnity: "Don't go off half cock, old fellow."
"What! Have you fallen for the bugaboo?"
"My dear Tough," said Stover, with a little gorgeousness, "don't commit
yourself until you know the whole business. You like the feeling here,
don't you--the way every one is out working for something?"
"You bet I do."
"Well, it's the society system that does it."
"Come off."
"Wait and see."
"But what in the name of my aunt's cat's pants," said McCarthy,
unwilling to relinquish the red rag, "what in the name of common sense
is the holy sacred secret, that it can't be looked at, talked about, or
touched?"
"Don't be a galoot, Tough," said Stover, in a superior way; "don't be a
frantic ass. All that's exaggerated; only little jack-asses like Schley
are frightened by it. The real side, the serious side, is that the
system is built up for the fellows who are going to do something for
Yale. Now, just wait until you get your eyes open before you go shooting
up the place."
But, as he stood in his own bedroom, with no Tough McCarthy to instruct
and patronize, alone at his window, looking out at the sputtering arc
lights with their splotchy regions of light and the busy windows of
Pierson Hall across the way, listening to the chapel sending forth its
quarter hour over the half-divined campus--he was not quite so confident
of all he had proclaimed.
"It's different--different from school," he said to himself half
apologetically. "It can't be the same as school. It's got to be
organized differently. It's the same everywhere."
He went to bed, to sleep badly, restless and unconvinced, a stranger in
strange places, staring at the flickering glare of the arc light against
the window-panes, that light as unreal in comparison with the frank
sunlight as the sudden bewildering introduction to the new, complex life
was different from the direct and rugged simplicity of the unconscious
democracy of school that had gone.
He awoke with a start, to find McCarthy and Dopey McNab, in striped
pajamas, solicitously occupied in applying a lather to his bare feet. He
sprang up with all the old zest, and, a free scrimmage taking place,
wreaked satisfactory vengeance on the intruders.
"Hang you, Stover," said McNab weakly, "if you'd snored another minute
I'd have won my dollar from McCarthy. If you want to be friends, nothing
like being friendly, is there? Come on down to my rooms, we've got eggs
and coffee right on tap. It's a bore going down to the joint. To-morrow
we'll all be slaves of the alarm clock again. Hang compulsory chapel."
They breakfasted hilariously under McNab's irresistible good humor. When
at last Stover sauntered out to reconnoiter in company with McCarthy, a
great change had come. The emotions of the night, the restless
rebelliousness, had lost all their acuteness and seemed only a blurred
memory. The college of the day was a different thing.
The late arrivals were swarming in carriages, or on top of heaped
express-wagons, just as the school used to surge hilariously back. The
windows were open, crowded with eager heads; the street corners
clustered with swiftly assembling groups, sophomores almost entirely,
past whom isolated, self-conscious freshmen went with averted gaze, to
the occasional accompaniment of a whistled freshman march. Despite
himself, Stover began to feel a little tightening in the shoulders, a
little uncertainty in the swing of his walk, and something in his back
seemed uneasily conscious of the concentrated attack of superior eyes.
They entered the campus, now the campus of the busy day. Across by the
chapel, the fence was hidden under continually arriving groups of upper
classmen, streaming to it in threes and fours in muscular enthusiasm.
There was no division there. Gradually the troubled perceptions of the
night before faded from Stover's consciousness. The light he saw was the
clear noon of the day, and the air that filled his lungs the atmosphere
of life and ambition.
At every step, runners for eating-houses, steam laundries, and tailors
thrust cards in their hands, coaxing for orders. Every tree seemed
plastered with notices of the awakening year, summons to trials for the
musical organizations and the glee club, offers to tutor, announcements
of coming competitions, calls for candidates to a dozen activities.
"Hello, Dink, old boy!"
They looked up to behold Charley De Soto, junior over in the Sheffield
Scientific School, bearing down upon them.
"Hello, Tough, glad to see you up here!"
De Soto had been at Lawrenceville with them, a comrade of the eleven,
now prospective quarter-back for the coming season.
"You've put on weight, Dink," he said with critical approval. "You've
got a bully chance this year. Are you reporting this afternoon?"
"Captain Dana asked me to come out for the varsity."
"I talked to him about you."
He asked a dozen questions, invited them over to see him, and was off.
They elbowed their way into the Coöp to make their purchases. The first
issue of the _News_ was already on sale, with its notices and its
appeals.
They went out and past Vanderbilt toward their eating-joint. Off the
campus, directly at the end of their path, a shape more like a monstrous
shadow than a building rose up, solid, ivy-covered, blind, with great,
prison-like doors, heavily padlocked.
"Fee-fi-fo-fum," said McCarthy.
"Which is it?" said Stover, in a different tone.
"Skull and Bones, of course," said McCarthy defiantly. "Look at it under
your eyelids, quick; don't let any one see you."
Stover, without hearing him, gazed ahead, impressed despite himself.
There it was, the symbol and the embodiment of all the subtle forces
that had been disclosed to him, the force that had stood amid the
passing classes, imposing its authority unquestioned, waiting at the end
of the long journey to give or withhold the final coveted success.
"Will I make it--will I ever make it?" he said to himself, drawing a
long breath. "To be one of fifteen--only fifteen!"
"It is a scary sort of looking old place," said McCarthy. "They
certainly have dressed it up for the part."
Still Stover did not reply. The dark, weighty, massive silhouette had
somehow entered his imagination, never to be shaken off, to range itself
wherever he went in the shadowy background of his dreams.
"It stands for democracy, Tough," he said, as they turned toward Chapel
Street, and there was in his voice a certain emotion he couldn't
control. "And I guess the mistakes it makes are pretty honest ones."
"Perhaps," said McCarthy stubbornly. "But why all this mumbo-jumbo
business?"
"It doesn't affect you, does it?"
"The trouble is, it does," said McCarthy, with a laugh. "Do you know
what I ought to do?"
"What?"
"Go right up and sit on the steps of the bloomin' old thing and eat a
bag of cream-puffs."
Stover exploded with laughter.
"What the deuce would be the sense in that, you old anarchist?"
"To prove to my own satisfaction that I'm a man."
"Do you mean it?" said Stover, half laughing.
McCarthy scratched his head with one of the old boyish, comical gestures
Stover knew so well.
"Well, perhaps I mean more than I think," he said, grinning. "In
another month I may get it as bad as that little uselessness Schley. By
the way, he wants us over at his eating-joint."
"He does?"
"He's a horsefly sort of a cuss. You'll see, he'll fasten on to you just
as soon as he thinks it worth while. Here we are."
They pressed their way, saluted with the imperious rattle of knives and
plates, through three or four rooms, blue-gray with smoke, and found a
vacant table in a far corner. A certain reserve was still prevalent in
the noisy throng, which had not yet been welded together. Immediately a
thin, wiry fellow, neatly dressed, hair plastered, affable and brimming
over with energy, rose and pumped McCarthy's hand, slapping him
effusively on the back.
"Bully! Glad to see you. This is Stover, of course. I'm Gimbel--Ray
Gimbel; you don't know me, but I know you. Seen entirely too much of you
on the wrong side of the field in the Andover-Lawrenceville game."
"How are you, Gimbel?" said Stover, not disliking the flattery, though
perceiving it.
"We were greatly worried about you," said Gimbel directly, and with a
sudden important seriousness. "There was a rumor around you had switched
to Princeton."
"Oh, no."
"Well, we're certainly glad you didn't." Looking him straight in the
face, he said with conviction: "You'll be captain here."
"I'm not worrying about that just at present," said Stover, amused.
"All right; that's my prophecy. I'll be back in a second."
He departed hastily, to welcome new arrivals with convulsive grip and
rolling urbanity, passing like a doctor on his hospital rounds.
"Who's Gimbel?" said Stover, wondering, as he watched him, what new
force he represented.
"Hurdler up at Andover, I believe."
In a moment Gimbel was back, engaging them in eager conclave.
"See here, there's a combination being gotten up," he said impersonally,
"a sort of slate for our class football managers, and I want to get you
fellows interested. Hotchkiss and St. Paul are going in together, and we
want to organize the other schools. How many fellows are up from
Lawrenceville?"
"About fifteen."
"We've got a corking good man from Andover not in any of the crowds up
there, and a lot of us want to give him a good start. I'll have you meet
him to-night at supper. If you fellows weren't out for football, we'd
put one of you up for secretary and treasurer. You can name him if you
want. I've got a hundred votes already, and we're putting through a deal
with a Sheff crowd for vice-president that will give us thirty or forty
more. Our man's Hicks--Frank Hicks--the best in the world. Say a good
word for him, will you, wherever you can. See you to-night."
He was off to another table, where he was soon in animated conversation.
"Don't mix up in it," said Stover quietly.
"Why not?" said McCarthy. "A good old political shindig's lots of fun."
"Wait until we understand the game," said Stover, remembering Le Baron's
advice not to commit himself to any crowd.
"But it would be such a lark."
Dink did not reply. Instead he was carefully studying the many types
that crowded before his eyes. They ranged from the New Yorker, extra
spick-and-span for his arrival, lost and ill at ease, speaking to no
one; to older men in jerseys and sweaters, unshaven often, lolling back
in their chairs, concerned with no one, talking with all.
The waiters were of his own class, who presently brought their plates to
the tables they served and sat down without embarrassment. It was a
heterogeneous assembly, with a preponderance of quiet, serious types,
men to whom the financial problem was serious and college an opportunity
to fit themselves for the grinding combat of life. Others were raw,
decidedly without experience, opinionated, carrying on their shoulders a
chip of somewhat bumptious pride. The talk was all of the doings of the
night before, when several had fallen into the hands of mischief-bent
sophomores.
"They caught Flanders down York Street and made him roll a peanut up to
Billy's."
"Yes, and the darned fool hadn't sense enough to grin and bear it."
"So they gave him a beer shampoo."
"A what?"
"A beer shampoo."
"Did you hear about Regan?"
"Who's Regan?"
"He's a thundering big coal-heaver from out the woolly West."
"Oh, the fellow that started to scrap."
"That's the man."
"Give us the story, Buck."
"They had me up, doing some of my foolish stunts," said a fellow with a
great moon of a face, little twinkling eyes, and a grotesque nose that
sprang forth like a jagged promontory, "when, all at once, this elephant
of a Regan saunters in coolly to see what's doing."
"Didn't know any better, eh?"
"Didn't know a thing. Well, no sooner did the sophs spot him than they
set up a yell:
"'Who are you?'
"'Tom Regan.'
"'What's your class?'
"'Freshman.'
"'What in the blankety-blank are you doing here?'
"'Lookin' on.'
"With that, of course, they began just leaping up and down for joy,
hugging one another; and a couple of them started in to tackle the old
locomotive. The fellow, who's as strong as an ox, just gives a cough and
a sneeze, scatters a few little sophs on the floor, and in a twinkling
is in the corner, barricaded behind a table, looking as big as a house.
"'Tom, look out; they're going to shampoo you,' says I.
"'Is it all right?' he says, with a grin.
"'It's etiquette,' says I.
"'Come on, then,' says he very affably, and he strips off his coat and
tosses it across the room, saying, 'It's my only one; look out for it.'
"Well, when the sophs saw him standing there, licking his chops, arms as
big as hams, they sort of stopped and scratched their heads."
"I bet they did!" cried a couple.
"They didn't particularly like the prospect; but they were game,
especially a little bantam of a rooster called Waring, who'd been
putting us through our stunts.
"'I'm going in after that bug myself,' said he, with a yelp. 'Come
on!'"
"Well, what happened, Buck?"
"Did they give it to him?"
"About fifteen minutes after the bouncers had swept us into the street
with the rest of the _débris_, as the French say," said the speaker,
with a far-off, reflective look, "one dozen of the happiest-looking
sophs you ever saw went reeling back to the campus. They were torn and
scratched, pummeled, bruised and bleeding, soaked from head to foot,
shot to pieces, smeared with paint, not a button left or a necktie--but
they were happy!"
"Why happy?"
"They had given _Regan_ the shampoo."
Stover and McCarthy rose and made their way out past the group where
Buck Waters, enthroned already as a natural leader, was tuning up the
crowd.
"I came up in the train with Regan," said Stover, thrilling a little at
the recital. "Cracky! I wish I'd seen the scrap."
"We'll call him out to-night for the wrestling," said McCarthy.
"He's a queer, plunging sort of animal," said Stover reflectively. "I
wonder if he'll ever do anything up here?"
Saunders, riding past on a bicycle, pad protruding from his pocket,
slowed up with a cordial hail:
"Howdy! I'm heeling the _News_. If you get any stories, pass them on to
me. Thought you fellows were down at our joint. Where the deuce are you
fellows grubbing?"
"We dropped into a place one of your Andover crowd's runnin'."
"Who's that?"
"Fellow called Gimbel."
Saunders rode on a bit, wheeled, came slowly back, resting his hand on
Stover's shoulder.
"Look here," he said, frowning a little. "Gimbel's a good sort, clever
and all that; but look here--you're not decided, are you?"
"No."
"Because we've been counting you fellows in with us. We've got a corking
crowd, about twenty, and a nice, quiet place." He hesitated, choosing
his words carefully: "I think you'll find the crowd congenial."
"When do you start in?" said Stover.
"To-morrow. Are you with us?"
"Glad to come."
"Bully!" He made a movement to start, and then added suddenly: "I say,
fellows, of course you're not on to a good many games here, but don't
get roped into any politics. It'll queer you quicker than anything else.
You don't mind my giving you a tip?"
"Not at all," said Stover, smiling a little as he wondered what
distinction Saunders made to himself between politics and politics.
"Ta-ta, then--perfectly bully you're with us. I'm off on this infernal
_News_ game--half a year's grind from twelve to ten at night--lovely,
eh, when the snow and slush come?"
He sped on, and they went up to the rooms.
"I thought we'd better change," said Stover.
"This place is loaded up with wires--live wires," said McCarthy,
scratching his head. "Well, go ahead, if you want to."
"Well, you see--we're all in the same house; it's more sociable."
"Oh, of course."
"And then, it'll be quieter."
"Yes, it'll be quieter."
A little constraint came to them. They went to their rooms silently,
each aware that something had come into their comradeship which sooner
or later would have to be met with frankness.